I like ESX. I like Linux. It is absurdly easy to configure Linux as an NFS server and mount it in ESXIi). Installed NFS I currently use Ubuntu Server for my home lab, but the process is basically the same for Red Hat and derivatives. sudo apt-get install nfs-common sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server Next, configure NFS so it can server your local LAN. Normally you would list only specific servers, but, well, we’re being cheap and dirty today. Open /etc/exports in VI or your editor of choice.

I’m not impressed too often with much software, especially the closed source kind. I find a leaning preference to all things FOSS. If I had a million dollars, I’d likely spend all day contributing to all the projects I wish I had time to contribute to. Regardless, there are a select few closed-source products that I believe are truly excellent. I mean, the type of software where you aren’t asking “I wish this could do this” and start asking “I wonder what else this can do.”

I’ve been side-tracked on another little project, and keep coming back to NetFlow. For this project I’ll need to access NetFlow data with Django, but this is a bit tricky. First, I’m sort of lazy when it comes to my own project; maybe not lazy, I just like taking the most direct route. The most up-to-date NetFlow collector I noticed was flow-tools, and there is even a switch to export the information into MySQL. Sweet! However, I wanted to insert the flows into MySQL automatically, or at least on a regular basis. I first started writing a python script that would do the job, but after a few minutes noticed flow-capture had a rotate_program switch, and started investigating. Since I somehow …

I’ve evaluated Zenoss before, but forgot the default password, and searching for it didn’t come up with anything quickly. I tried everything under the sun: password, 1234, admin, God, Sex, but alas, grep to the rescue: kelvin@monitor:/usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/etc$ grep admin * hubpasswd:admin:zenoss Update: it is listed on page 4 of the Admin PDF :)

My little server doesn’t have a cdrom, but I didn’t want to actually run ESX from a USB (i.e. esx-on-a-stick). Here are my notes of configuring a flash disk to boot the ESX installer (so you can install it onto a local disk). For this demo, my USB is /dev/sdb Install the syslinux utils to your computer (apt-get install syslinux mboot) Install the MBR sudo install-mbr /dev/sdb Copy all the files from the ISO to your fat32 formated partition Install syslinux sudo syslinux /dev/sdb1 Move isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg, and try booting. If it doesn’t work, edit syslinux.cfg says something like: default menu.c32 menu title ESXi Boot timeout 100 label ESXi menu label Boot VMware ESXi kernel mboot.c32 …

As you can tell from reading some of the other pages, I like Linux and open source. But I also like to answer the question “what if…” This post is my [brief] run down of answering “what if I could run Django on Server 2003 with SQL Server and IIS.” Why, you may ask? To be honest with you, at this point, I don’t really know. One of the deciding factors was seeing that the django-mssql project maintains support for inspectdb, which means I could take a stock 2003 server running SQL Server, inspect the DB, and build a web app on top of it. The Django docs offer a lengthy howto for using Django with IIS and SQL Server, but the website for PyISAPIe seems to have been down for the …

Backing up your Openfiler box to S3 While I don’t think most pople would expect to backup their entire NAS/SAN to Amazon’s S3, there might be a few very crucial things you need to backup. I’ve seen an implementation using Ruby and s3sync – something that I do on my server – but I’m trying to migrate everything to Python. Although there are a lot of great tools out there for S3, many of them Python-based, I wanted to do one thing and do it well: have one complete full backup available, and using as little bandwidth as possible. In these regards Duplicity would work well, except I wanted the ability to browse the S3 store using any other tool.

Using TimeVault with a shared drive as a backend is actually quite easy, but it does require a few special things setup. Note: this is gonna be a brief summary. Install samba-tools, smbfs… sudo apt-get install samba-tools smbfs A lot more other stuff may install as well. Create a script that mounts your samba share. You could also do this in fstab, but I tend to suspend my laptop when I come home, and I like clicking buttons.

I’m writing down these quick notes so I can remember the steps for getting py2exe to work with GTK. Download the GTK+ runtime Download py2exe Copy over your project into the windows box Create a setup.py file (see below) Run “c:\Python25\python.exe setup.py py2exe” Copy over the lib, etc, and share folder from C:\Program Files\GTK2-Runtime into the dist folder Run app! setup.py: from distutils.core import setup import py2exe setup( name = 'ploteq', description = 'Bunnys Plotting Tool', version = '1.0', windows = [ { 'script': 'ploteq.py', } ], options = { 'py2exe': { 'packages':'encodings', 'includes': 'cairo, pango, …

This is the laundry list of things I did while creating a mod_tile VMware appliance based on Ubuntu Server 8.04. I’ve kept descriptions limited but left all the commands in. Let’s start installing things… Useful goodies for compiling source sudo apt-get build-essential More goodies for Mapnik + Friends sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-filesystem1.34.1 libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-iostreams1.34.1 libboost-program-options-dev libboost-program-options1.34.1 libboost-python-dev libboost-python1.34.1 libboost-regex-dev libboost-regex1.34.1 libboost-serialization-dev libboost-serialization1.34.1 libboost-thread-dev libboost-thread1.34.1 libicu-dev libicu38 …